We’ve hit the halfway point of the 30 Day Challenge. If this were a Bikram class, we’d actually be roughly two-thirds of the way home. Of course, if this were a Bikram class, I’d also get to rest.
They do not call it the Torture Chamber for nothing. In my lifetime, I’ve only heard one other thing referred to in such a manner, and that’s the utterly unique and devastating low post game of Celtics great Kevin McHale.
It’s strange now, nearly 25 years after McHale’s peak, to realize that the Kevin McHale on Glee is more famous than the Hall of Fame basketball player. But in a way, it’s appropriate. McHale spent his career in the shadow of one of the all-time greats, Larry Bird. He had a Hall of Fame game—a devastating slate of low post moves on one end, and a totally disruptive defensive ability at the other—but the demeanor of a second banana. Bird always felt McHale could be the best player in the league, and it killed him that McHale didn’t care enough to accomplish. But that’s exactly why Bird was Bird—he had to be the best. McHale loved the game, but for him it was fun. He was as quick with a post-game quip as he was with an up-and-under scoop shot at the rim.
McHale may have finally found his post-career stride as an insightful and funny commentator on TNT’s NBA broadcasts. No one would have foreseen that in 2004, when the skinny project McHale drafted in 1995, Kevin Garnett, won the MVP and sparked a veteran Timberwolves to a conference finals appearance. But that was as good as it got for McHale in Minnesota, and contract disputes, mediocre draft picks, and the eventual trade of Garnett to Boston sealed his fate.
Watching the clip below of McHale’s vintage moves—head and shoulder fakes, dip-ins, duck-unders and fadeaway pumpkins—one thing is clear. If you game me NBA size, All-Star ability, and a time machine, I would rather still spend three hours each day for a month in Bikram’s torture chamber than to spend half that time in McHale’s torture chamber.
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